News

News by State

Supreme Court says would can challenge anti-terrorism law used against her

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, said that a woman could challenge the use of an anti-terrorism law to prosecute her for planting deadly chemicals around the car and house of her husband’s mistress.

Carol Anne Bond will be allowed to challenge the conviction that sent her to prison in 2007, despite arguments from prosecutors that she should not be allowed to appeal the verdict, according to the Associated Press.

Federal prosecutors were able to send her to prison using a law designed to protect the United States from the use of chemical weapons. The jilted Bond was convicted of attempting to poison her husband’s pregnant lover by spreading chemicals around her house, car and mailbox. Bond stole compounds from her employer, a chemical manufacturing company, and purchased others using Amazon.com.

Bond, a 41-year-old Pennsylvania woman, used the 10th Amendment to challenge her conviction, saying that the federal government’s decision to use the chemical weapons law was unconstitutional on the grounds that it interfered in the state’s power to handle what her lawyer has called a domestic dispute, the AP reports.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia tossed her appeal, saying that only states, not individuals, had the capacity to make 10th Amendment arguments about federal interference in state matters.

The Supreme Court has now overturned that ruling, allowing Bond to challenge the use of the anti-terrorism law in her case.

Myrlina Haynes, both Bond’s victim and best friend, noticed the chemicals after receiving a minor burn. She notified local authorities of her suspicions, but they refused to investigate to her satisfaction, according to the AP. Realizing there were chemicals on her mailbox, Haynes notified postal inspectors, who captured Bond on videotape and arrested her.

A federal grand jury indicted Bond on two counts of possessing and using chemical weapons under an anti-terrorism law that had been passed as part of U.S. international treaty obligations to the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction.